Twenty Favorite Collections of Flash Fiction (An International Selection)
(alphabetically by author, with ten from America and ten from elsewhere)
American
Hoopty Time Machines: Fairy Tales for Grown Ups by Christopher DeWan
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman
You on Mars: Failed Sci-Fi Stories by Jennifer A. Howard
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon
The Afflictions by Vikram Paralkar
And Yet They Were Happy by Helen Phillips
Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables & Problems by Adam Ehrlich Sachs
Cradle Book: Stories & Fables by Craig Morgan Teicher
Ghosts of You by Cathy Ulrich
Minor Robberies by Deb Olin Unferth
Non-American
Blue Has No South by Alex Epstein (Israel)
Palm-of-the-Hand Stories by Yasunari Kawabata (Japan)
Atlas Inutilis by Hervé Le Tellier (France)
Centuria: One Hundred Ouroboric Novels by Giorgio Manganelli (Italy)
Complete Works and Other Stories by Augusto Monterroso (Guatemala)
The Toy Catalogue by Sandra Petrignani (Italy)
Anthropology by Dan Rhodes (England)
Microfictions by Ana Maria Shua (Argentina)
Grow a Pair: 9½ Fairy Tales About Sex by Joanna Walsh (England)
The Temple of Iconoclasts by J. Rodolfo Wilcock (Argentina/Italy)
(I want to add one album to this list: Uncommon Deities, a 2012 release on the Samadhisound label, on which, with the musical accompaniment of Jan Bang, Erik Honoré, Arve Henriksen, and Sidsel Endresen, David Sylvian recites a series of what I would consider flash pieces, mostly written by the Norwegian writer Paal Helge-Haugen, about the hidden and forgotten gods of the universe. You can listen to it here.)
— September 12, 2020